Paul Levinson's Blog: Levinson at Large, page 372

The Borgias Season 2 Sneak Preview Review

I had the pleasure of seeing the first 4 episodes of The Borgias second season - thanks to a Showtime screener - and can reveal the following -
two important deaths, one male, one female, neither of their own handtwo new appealing (in different ways) female charactersin general, and especially regarding the 3rd and 4th episodes, I think season 2 is considerably better than season 1 (and this is saying a lot, since I much enjoyed the first season) Great political maneuvering, nice nudity, and top-notch military confrontation (even better than the first season) continue to light up The Borgias.   The family is at the height of its game, always close to being rent apart by its internecine battles, but pulling together when needed.  As a successor, in a sense, to Rome and The Tudors, I'd say this new season of The Borgias is now about as good as the excellent Tudors.  As with those earlier series, sex continues to be one of the stars of The Borgias, with a menage-a-trois making an appearance in the first four new episodes.

And I'll be back when the second season begins on April  8 with proper reviews of each episode.

See also The Borgias Sneak Preview Review ... The Borgias 1.5: Machiavellian Politics and Marriage ... The Borgias 1.6: Beds, Leg, Cannon ... Borgias  Season One Concludes


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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...


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New York Times Tightens Digital Paywall

So, as I've been saying ever since The New York Times announced its digital paywall more than a year ago, the newspaper of record today announced that it was raising the wall even higher, cutting the number of articles than can be read on its site for free from 20 to 10.

This was no doubt done to increase its number of paying customers online, which is now about half a million, or half of its offline, paper subscribers.  And that's certainly a good start.  But where will it lead?

Today's announcement suggests that a time will soon come when nothing of The New York Times will be available for free online.   This newspaper, in other words, will have thoroughly rejected the model of broadcast media, which made radio and then television the media with the biggest audiences and impact in the 20th century.  Free content has already propelled The Huffington Post to an Alexa rank of 84 (based on number of hits and incoming links), surpassing The New York Times at 98, as free online media continue to surge in impact in the 21st century.

If The New York Times  continues on this path of requiring payment for its content, rather than devising ways of earning revenue through it advertising, it will continue to move from being the newspaper of record to the newspaper of the past. 

Which is not the worst thing in the world.  Legitimate theater continues in an age of movies and television, but the stage has long since lost the audiences it commanded in 1900. 
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Alcratraz 1.11: Lucy, Lucy, Lucy

Alcatraz 1.11 moved up to the two-hour season finale next week, with an episode that brought us more information about Lucy, and had her come out of her coma in 2012 at the end.

As Dr. Diego and Rebecca note, Lucy is one of the keys to what's really going on with the time shift of prisoners and a couple of "good" people from 1963 to the 2012.  As far as we know, Lucy and Dr. Beauregard are the only high-level officials in the prison who shifted (we don't know about the warden, and that's significant).  Both are thus of keen interest to Hauser.

But Lucy, as we see more evidence of in 1.11, is important to Hauser in another way.  As a prison guard in 1963, he was falling in love with her.   Bringing her out of her coma in 2012 is thus his single most important goal.

Why, in 2012, did Cobb shoot her?   Presumably, if there was a deeper reason beyond his murderous ways, to keep her quiet.  But on whose orders?

The obvious bad guy at the root of all of this, it seems to me, is the warden.  He has shown himself a first-rate sadist in episode after episode.  And, he, too, back in 1963, was attracted to Lucy.   Did he get Cobb to shoot her in 2012 so she couldn't be with Hauser, in addition to preventing her from helping Hauser get to the bottom of the shift?

The obscuring mists in this dark drama may be clearing just a little next week.

See also Trying to Like Alcatraz


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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book



Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...




Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

The Walking Dead Season 2 Finale

Well, fans have been longing all season for some all-out walker attack, and we got our wish in the Season 2 finale of The Walking Dead tonight, with all hell breaking out of Atlanta, proceeding right up and onto the farm.   Kudos to the shufflers, who put out some of the best subtle diversity in zombie shuffling I've seen in the entire two seasons.  And the Emmy for the best walker shuffling spasmodic walk goes to ...

What precipitated the march out of Atlanta?  We see a helicopter in the sky - the same one we saw in the coming attractions for this season in the first episode.  Humans on the move. Some sort of good news for the future.

But bad news for our group, now joined by Hershel's, now forced to leave the farm.  All of our people survive, some of Hershel's don't, but Hershel, Maggie, and Beth make it.  Great scene of Hershel making like Davy Crockett at the Alamo, but Hershel survives, and I'm glad.   He's one of my favorite characters.

Andrea, separated from the group, nearly doesn't make it, but she's rescued by a hooded figure with two walkers in tow.  Presumably their smell keeps other walkers away.   But who is the person behind the hood?  Male, female?   Like the helicopter, we'll no doubt find out more about this next season.

Which brings us to rest of the group.  Rick eventually tells everyone everything - he killed Shane. and Carl killed zombie Shane.  And everyone is a carrier, as I hypothesized last week (there was really no other explanation).  Everyone's a little put off that Rick didn't tell them - he learned this from the CDC doc last year (as I also figured out last week).

I get why the group is unhappy about Rick - but I didn't get Lori.  What is she so angry about?   That Carl had to kill zombie Shane?   She was the one who set Shane in motion last week, by telling him that she didn't know if he or Rick was really the father of the baby she is carrying.  And didn't she tell Rick a few weeks ago that Shane was a danger to everyone, especially Rick?  So what is she so angry about now?  She should be angry at herself.

Rick has ample reason to be no more Mr. Nice Guy, and it will be great to how this starts playing out come September.

See also The Walking Dead Back on AMC ... The Walking Dead 2.2: The Nature of Vet... The Walking Dead 2.3: Shane and Otis ... The Walking Dead 2.4: What Happened at the Pharmacy ... The Walking Dead 2.6: Secrets Told ... The Walking Dead 2.7: Rick's Way vs. Shane's Way ...  The Walking Dead 2.8: The Farm, the Road, and the Town  ... The Walking Dead 2.9: Worse than Walkers ... The Walking Dead 2.11: Young Calling the Shots ... The Walking Dead 2.12: Walkers Without Bites
 And see also The Walking Dead 1.1-3:  Gone with the Wind, Zombie Style ... The Walking Dead Ends First Season
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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book


Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ... Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Touch: Fractals, Heroes, and 24

Touch joins Awake as one of the most intelligent shows on television - with heart and soul as well as intellect - refreshing, very complex, provocative, and altogether welcome.

Two great forces of popular culture come to bear in Touch - Kiefer Sutherland, who looks and sounds almost exactly the same as 24's Jack Bauer on Touch, and creator Tim Kring, who brought us Heroes.

Kiefer plays Martin Bohm, father of 10-year old Jake, who's mute and diagnosed as autistic, but is much much more.   Jake does have an incredible memory - like the classic idiot savant - but he also can see, intuit, understand the fractal nature of the universe, or the interconnected patterns of everything around us.  This part of the story - fractals - is science not science fiction.  Why, for example, do leafs and bird wings have the same patterns, when they have no evolutionary connection?   The universe, it seems, offers up a given series of templates - which harken, in a sense, to Plato's ideal forms.

But Jake sees much more than this, and here is where the wonder and amazement of science fiction come in.  Not only is Jake sympatico with fractals, but with quantum mechanics, and the part of it that compresses past, present, and future into an omnipresent now.   In plain English, Jake not only sees the interconnections, but where they can lead.   His chosen job is to get silent word out about bad futures to his father, so Martin can do something to avert them.

The pilot has two distinct stories, both connected via Martin, otherwise distinct from each other.  One concerns a smart phone that someone loses at the airport, which Martin gets his hands on, but before he can return to the owner,  gets called away to help get Jake down from a steep construction site on which he has climbed.  Good thing, too, because that phone set loose in the world eventually leads to stopping a suicide bomber, and making a singer famous.   The other plot concerns a firefighter who almost saved Jake's mother's (Martin's wife's) life on 9/11, and has felt guilty about that ever since.  Jake's interventions lead to a school bus of kids saved and the firefighter reclaiming his sense of self-worth.  Both of these happy endings follow a long series of apparently unrelated events, and the fun  is in seeing how these events all tie into one another - see, that is, what Jake already knows.

Meanwhile, Martin learns more of what's happening in Jake's head from Arthur Teller (Danny Glover), a sage old guy in the Bronx.   With Martin now realizing at least part of what Jake is up to do, the stage is set for some wild, complicated stories in which Martin tries to pick up on Jake's leads to shape the future.

Heroes meets 24?   That's just the past, Touch is the future, and I'm looking forward to more (including that 24 movie which is somewhere still to be made).

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book



Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Awake 1.3: Frequency of Yelllow and Blue

No great shakes or revelations in Awake 1.3 last night - and I did get guess the villain as the old partner almost as soon as his mug was on the screen - but the episode did deepen our understanding of Britten's family nonetheless, with excellent exposition of Britten and his son Rex.

Especially memorable was Rex's explanation of why he resents Britten (in blue world).   Rex understandably is still deeply grieving for his mother, and, every time he sees Britten, which (I think) is every day, Rex is angry and conflicted about his father rather than his mother surviving.  Up until this episode, we've mostly seen the internal conflicts of Britten.  It was good to see Rex's now as well.

I said "I think" about Rex seeing Bitten, and our seeing blue (and yellow) world every day, because I'm not sure.  Britten takes sleeping pills to go to sleep after the harrowing blue day in which Rex is kidnapped, because he thinks (correctly) that he'll find some clues in yellow world.  And he wakes up the next morning - or seconds later in screen time - with Hannah beside him.  But, in other interludes in the first three episodes, we've seen Britten just shift between blue and yellow worlds in the middle of the day.  Are we really also seeing a shift from the middle of one day in blue or yellow world to the middle of the next in the alternate world?

Meanwhile, speaking of Hannah, exactly how much does she know about Britten's blue world in which Rex lives (and she does not).  We've seen the couple talk a little about this previously.  Last night, Britten tells her he can't join her at a Rex memorial because he has a kidnap case - involving a boy.  Later, Hannah asks him if the boy was ok - was this shorthand for her asking if Rex was ok, and did Hannah realize on some level that the kidnap of Rex in Britten's "dream" was what he was working on, what was keeping him from being with her at Rex's memorial?

Important continuing questions, which make this show worth watching even when there is no further development of the apparently nefarious captain.

See also Awake ... Awake 1.2: "Whole" Family

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book



Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Barack Obama, Rutherford Hayes, and William Orton

I heard Barack Obama call out Rutherford B. Hayes (19th President of the United States) a few hours ago, pointing out that "one of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: 'It's a great invention but who would ever want to use one?' That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore."

At least one historian, Nan Card, has come to Hayes' defense - saying there's no real evidence of Hayes' comment - and, you know what, even though I'm an Obama supporter, my allegiance to accurate history bids me to say Card is right.   There is no evidence that Hayes ever said that.

The timing is certainly right.   The telephone was invented in 1876, the year Hayes lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel Tilden.  Hayes became President anyway in 1877, due to the "Compromise of 1877," and served one term, until 1881.  But few people had much conception of what the telephone could do, so soon after its invention.   And the truth is that with so few telephones in anyone's hands, there was indeed not much that anyone could do then with a phone.

Certainly William Orton, President of Western Union Telegraph, was no fan.  As I detailed in my book, The Soft Edge, Orton was in 1881 asked for advice by his friend, another Republican, Chauncey Depew, who had been offered the opportunity to buy one sixth of all Bell Telephone stock into perpetuity for the sum of $10,000.  Now, ten thousand dollars was a lot more in 1881 than it is today, but it was still a pretty sweet deal.  Orton's advice, however: don't make the investment, the telephone will never be more than a "scientific toy".  Depew declined the offer.   Perhaps the Orton incident was the source of the Hayes anecdote.

And this was not the only poor moment for the hapless Depew.  He was thinking of going for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1888, which he likely would have been given (in an era before primaries), but was advised that incumbent Democrat Grover Cleveland was unbeatable.  Republican Benjamin Harrison went on to become the next President, losing the popular vote to Cleveland in the election of 1888 but prevailing in the electoral college.

The truths of history are often more fascinating than fiction.  Obama's speech writers would do well to consult it a little more carefully.

Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Barack Obama, Rutheford Hayes, and William Orton

I heard Barack Obama call out Rutherford B. Hayes (19th President of the United States) a few hours ago, pointing out that "one of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: 'It's a great invention but who would ever want to use one?' That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore."

At least one historian, Nan Card, has come to Hayes' defense - saying there's no real evidence of Hayes' comment - and, you know what, even though I'm an Obama supporter, my allegiance to accurate history bids me to say Card is right.   There is no evidence that Hayes ever said that.

The timing is certainly right.   The telephone was invented in 1876, the year Hayes lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel Tilden.  Hayes became President anyway in 1877, due to the "Compromise of 1877," and served one term, until 1881.  But few people had much conception of what the telephone could do, so soon after its invention.   And the truth is that with so few telephones in anyone's hands, there was indeed not much that anyone could do then with a phone.

Certainly William Orton, President of Western Union Telegraph, was no fan.  As I detailed in my book, The Soft Edge, Orton was in 1881 asked for advice by his friend, another Republican, Chauncey Depew, who had been offered the opportunity to buy one sixth of all Bell Telephone stock into perpetuity for the sum of $10,000.  Now, ten thousand dollars was a lot more in 1881 than it is today, but it was still a pretty sweet deal.  Orton's advice, however: don't make the investment, the telephone will never be more than a "scientific toy".  Depew declined the offer.   Perhaps the Orton incident was the source of the Hayes anecdote.

And this was not the only poor moment for the hapless Depew.  He was thinking of going for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1888, which he likely would have been given (in an era before primaries), but was advised that incumbent Democrat Grover Cleveland was unbeatable.  Republican Benjamin Harrison went on to become the next President, losing the popular vote to Cleveland in the election of 1888 but prevailing in the electoral college.

The truths of history are often more fascinating than fiction.  Obama's speech writers would do well to consult it a little more carefully.

Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

The Walking Dead 2.12: Walkers Without Bites

Episode 2.12 of The Walking Dead could have begun, with a nod to Rod Serling, "Submitted for your approval ..."
Randall, who as far as we know has not been bitten by walkers, turns up staggering in the woods as a walker, after Shane has killed him by breaking his neck.Shane, who as far as we know has been been bitten by walkers, goes staggering as a walker towards Rick, after Rick has killed Shane (with a knife, as Shane was trying to kill Rick).But how, as Glenn says about Randall, can that be?   As we saw last year, a bite by walker takes time to turn its victim into a walker. 

Best hypothesis - maybe the only viable hypothesis - is that is all the humans are now carrying around the walker virus, which they picked up without being bitten.   Presumably there are no overt symptoms of this virus not introduced by a bite.  (Though maybe that's what was afflicting Beth.)  Unclear whether the virus introduced in this way can be beaten back by the human immune system, and, if not, how long would it take for a human infected in this way to turn into a walker?

What is clear, if this hypothesis is correct, is that if a human so infected is killed, he or she rises very shortly after as a walker.   That would explain what happened tonight to Randall and Shane.

I generally am not thrilled about rabbits pulled out of hats, but this opens up some interesting possibilities, to say the least.  Maybe Hirschel is right, after all, that a cure van be found, based on studying the antibodies of humans carrying the walker virus.   Maybe that's what the scientist at the CDC told Rick at the end of the last season.   More practically, is every human in our group now infected in this unbitten way?

I can't say I'm sorry to see Shane go, and, with what Lori told him about her not really knowing if he or Rick was the father of her baby - an uncertainty we already knew - it's not surprising that he pushed the envelope tonight.  It was also good to see Carl save Rick's life by killing walker-Shane.

I have no idea what the sum total of fans are thinking about this year versus last year, but I'm liking this year of The Walking Dead just fine.

See also The Walking Dead Back on AMC ... The Walking Dead 2.2: The Nature of Vet... The Walking Dead 2.3: Shane and Otis ... The Walking Dead 2.4: What Happened at the Pharmacy ... The Walking Dead 2.6: Secrets Told ... The Walking Dead 2.7: Rick's Way vs. Shane's Way ...  The Walking Dead 2.8: The Farm, the Road, and the Town  ... The Walking Dead 2.9: Worse than Walkers ... The Walking Dead 2.11: Young Calling the Shots
 And see also The Walking Dead 1.1-3:  Gone with the Wind, Zombie Style ... The Walking Dead Ends First Season
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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book



Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Game Change

HBO's series are so superb, it's sometimes easy to forget that Home Box Office was first a movie channel, and has brought us some great original movies over the years.  Game Change, which premiered tonight, is surely one of the very best.

Based on the John Heilemann and Mark Halperin book of the same name, starring Woody Harrelson (Steve Schmidt), Julianne Moore (Sarah Palin), and Ed Harris (John McCain) in tour-de-force leading roles, Game Change the movie gives us a breathtaking, heartbreaking, frightening, but ultimately more or less inspiring view of the election of 2008 which all us remember, and most of us knew much of what the movie tells us.  We knew, for example, that Palin gave a great convention speech, bungled the Couric interview, went rouge in the campaign by not completely following McCain's positions, pretty much held her own in the debate with Biden, wanted to give a concession speech after the loss but was refused that precedent-setting privilege by some combination of Schmidt (campaign manager) and McCain.

We also knew that YouTube magnified Palin's interview blunders by keeping them in permanent play - I discussed this back in 2009 in New New Media, and Schmidt in the movie shows an astute understanding of this media revolution.

What we didn't know were some even more extraordinary pockets of Palin ignorance, including thinking the Queen of England is head of the British state, and Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.   That someone with such astonishing lack of knowledge was almost a heartbeat from the Presidency was enough to give Schmidt and Nicole Wallace (responsible for tutoring Palin in history) more than pause, and I hope most people a kick in the stomach right through the television screen tonight.   One can only assume that the single-minded focus on winning the election was enough to keep Schmidt from even allowing himself to consider the option of trying somehow to get Palin off the ticket.

Not that any attempt to convince her to resign would have worked.  And in that toughness, the great enigma of Sarah Palin comes across indelibly in the movie.  She's devastated by the media's response to her interview fumbles - the depth of her depression and fury being something else that we didn't quite know - yet she manages to pick herself up, and give a good debate performance against Biden, speaking from her heart.

Nicole Wallace, unfairly blamed by Palin for the interview fiascos, reveals to Schmidt in the end that she couldn't bring herself to vote for McCain-Palin, another revelation in the movie.  It didn't matter, because of course Obama won by far more than one vote.  In that sense - Obama winning and Wallace not voting - the system worked.

But are we less vulnerable to someone like Palin getting the nomination for Vice President today?   Until the crazy way our Vice Presidential candidates are selected is changed, our democracy will ever be on the precipice.
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